retail vs. oem? diff?

[diesoft]

I tried emailing accubyte.com what the real difference between the oem and retail versions of cpu's and video cards are, but they aren't answering. You gurus know?

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

Retail comes with an extended warranty, and in the case of CPU's, a HSF. Retail video cards usually come with games and other software bundles.

 

[Kingofcomputer]

retail is for retail store, good for displaying on the shelf.
oem is for VARs, System Integrators/Builders to build a complete PC to resell to end-users, not supposed to sell to end-users directly, but many mom&pop, online computer stores sell it to you, most oem stuff don't have warranty from manufacturers directly (except bare hd, some vga cards, etc), but such stores normally give you 1 yr warranty on everything (except cpu 7-30 days or 1 yr), and they like to put a date sticker on the thing to determine this item is sold by them.

 

[diesoft]

ok, then there's no real difference in quality? Same damn thing you'd get with retail, just not the extra crap?

 

[ST4RCUTTER]

Difference in quality?

No.

 

[John]

During the Celery 300a era of 1998, some people swore the Retail would O/C higher.

 

[jkj]

Wasn't there a difference in the clock speed of the newer ATI cards between retail and oem?

 

[John]

Yes

 

[Ausm]

The difference I ran into is buying an OEM drive from an online vendor which was orginally a DELL product

Ausm

 

[John]

I received a few new oem bare WD HDD's that had a Dell P/N on them. I became concerned and called WD. I was told that even though there is a DPN, the drive still carries a 3yr FULL warranty from WD. They claim that Dell might put an order in for 100K units and only use 90K. The 10K left over are put back into WD circulation and the S/N is updated to reflect a 3yr warranty.

 

[Kingofcomputer]

<< ok, then there's no real difference in quality? Same damn thing you'd get with retail, just not the extra crap? >>

There are oem, bare, bulk, most people just use "oem" for all of them, but there are difference.

For example, video card, oem could mean made by 3rd party, could also mean bare card without box, software, same card as the retail version, could also mean bulk pack, with same software as retail but brown/white box.